Elon Musk's SpaceX programme shows how the elitist space race descended into uninspiring holidays for the ultra-rich

Space travel and exploration has always been a hybrid project between the public and private sector. Over decades Nasa and other space agencies have created stunning innovations – only to have these discoveries taken by private companies and turned into profit. Everything from modern cameras to the sole of Adidas’ Boost sneakers trade on ideas that were originally created by space agencies.

But the new SpaceX development is more depressing than any of those corporate arrangements. It sees Elon Musk’s company steal the very founding ideals of space travel and sell them on to the highest bidder. It has announced that, with Nasa’s help, it will fling two people that have paid a “significant deposit” up into space, around the moon, and back again.

The business of being an astronaut used to be a strange, intoxicating pursuit. Militaristic and elite, its heroes embodied the very best of American and Russian values: pride, bravery, glory and success.

Now, those who go into space will no longer be selected for their skill at flying, or the steely heroism that made people like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin into national heroes. Instead, they’ll be picked based on whether they can pay the estimated $150m (£120m) that it costs to take the journey. Apparently, the US no longer chooses its best people to go into space, or to run the country, but instead selects its richest.

The space race was never healthy: in its glory days, it was a major part of Cold War competition. Politicians were less motivated by the joys of space than the shame they’d feel if the other superpower got there first. Space might have been the final frontier but it followed a history of frontiers, all of which required the extermination and subjugation of others through military means.

However, at least when rockets were funded as part of the space race, the engineers and scientists behind it could pretend it was something meaningful, and focus on innovation – now they are being relegated to highly qualified travel agents, working on what amounts to extraterrestrial coach holidays for the ultra-rich.

Throughout history, space exploration was able to keep alive its founding (if perhaps mythic) ideal: that it was being done in the service of a far bigger goal; all of humanity united in exploring beyond itself to find planets and perhaps even life that would challenge our understanding of what we are and can be.

But now, if human space exploration serves no real purpose other than entertainment, then the message is nothing more than this: the only way to leave this damaged and dying Earth is if you have a few hundred million pounds going spare. Exploration in the name of humanity has been replaced by exploration in the name of the highest bidder.

Space is populated by vast worlds untouched by humanity and beyond most of our imaginations. But these images can’t stay imaginary forever – we are destroying our own planet at such a rate that we might soon have to leave it and start living elsewhere, something that both Elon Musk and Donald Trump agree on. Could there possibly be a less inspiring way to restart our mission to disperse humans across the solar system than having two tourists, probably billionaires, pay excruciating sums of money to do so?

Elon Musk has already said that he might have to detonate two huge nuclear warheads on Mars to alter the environment and let us live there. Now SpaceX seems set on doing the same to our very idea of space travel.